David Toliver, the director of Corporate Marketing for Angel, recently wrote a blog post noting that Palo Alto (News - Alert) Networks’ senior director of Global Customer Support gave a webinar on how they achieved next-gen customer support by “rolling out a new, cloud-based IVR and call center and integrated it with their CRM system.”

Of course if you’re not integrating your CRM system with your IVR or call center, one may wonders why to bother having a CRM system in the first place. Chances are you could be doing a better job of it too, as the video can probably demonstrate.  

Palo Alto Networks had a problem you may be familiar with: Its contact center was heading toward obsolescence, simply not able to keep up with all the work. “Calls would fly in helter-skelter, with 15 support engineers struggling to keep up. When a call came into the support center, 15 phones would ring at the same time, and agents would either rush or hesitate to answer,” wrote Toliver.

The temp fix they instituted meant that after five rings, phone calls were forwarded to an outside temp agency, which would take a message and simply keep calling engineers until someone (anyone!) accepted the call.

They finally turned to Angel for a cloud-based, on-demand IVR and contact center integrated with Palo Alto’s Salesforce.com (News - Alert) CRM. It worked: “The ROI analysis showed that this would actually save them bottom-line costs over simply doing nothing at all and staying with their existing setup.” The company now connects 100 percent of incoming calls to engineers, with a 28 second average wait time, Toliver said, adding that because of the CTI (News - Alert)/screen pop function within the IVR/Salesforce.com integration, agents know exactly who is calling and why when they pick up the phone.

This mean: “No more call backs, no more backlog, no more struggling engineers—and best of all, no more frustrated customers.”